"The first artist from a non-socialist country to make a film under the auspices of Hungary's Béla Balàzs Studio, Hutton photographed Budapest's fading grandeur and present-day hardships under the wary gaze of government bureaucrats. 'Budapest Portrait suggests the photographs alternately of Eugène Atget and Bernd and Hilla Becher, if not a lushly entropic gloss on Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera…. Human presence is often suggested merely by indexical signs—photographs, shadows, or bullet holes. This relative absence of the figure, together with the harsh chiaroscuro of the winter light, induces a poignant sense of loneliness and isolation. Voluptuously gray, worn, and lived in, the city is like a stage set for an invisible drama' (J. Hoberman, Artforum)." — MoMA
"Budapest Portrait is the masterpiece of Hutton's austerely romantic worldview—a succession of moldering apartment houses and massive factories, lonely Stalinist monuments and revolutionary ghosts, faded splendor and industrial funk, in which the urban landscape comes to seem as natural as a peat-bog or a rain-forest. Human presence is minimal and typically suggested by indexical signs—photographs, shadows, bullet holes." — J. Hoberman for the Village Voice